It happens while they sleep, bodies huddled together in a mess of sprawling limbs and tangled clothing.
At night, Erica wraps tightly around Cora's middle, under her shirt and touching the bottom of her breasts with the bare skin of her arms. Boyd wraps around Erica from the side, making a haphazard pile of them. Hands and fingers and mouths linger against soft flesh as they come together and they do not speak of what it means.
It's an odd sort of arrangement, but they crave the warmth and necessity of contact, skin to skin, like they cannot remember craving anything else.
Erica is the last to fall asleep that night-was the last to fall asleep most every night-though in truth it could be day and they would have no idea. Time passes slowly, achingly so, in the tightly controlled confines of the vault.
But it happens while they sleep on the night of the new moon, though they don't know the phase of it as they cannot see or feel for the walls that suffocate their wolves into silence. It happens as they huddle together in broken comfort wishing to be rescued more than anything.
Boyd is the first to notice, though he's lucky enough not to have changed at all. He calls attention to the bratty whine that Erica lets out when she blinks blearily awake, and it occurs to him that Erica's whine (for it could be no one else's) is coming from the quiet, snarky brunette instead of the blonde to which it belongs.
The first few days stuck in each other's bodies feels like a test, like they're to be scored on their ability to act like nothing has changed and that they belong in the bodies they're breathing from.
They don't know if their captors are aware that Cora and Erica are in the wrong places, stuck in each other's mostly unfamiliar bodies. Erica would not be at all surprised if the demon wolf with his glassy red eyes had the very intention of thrusting them unaware into bodies that do not fit, and she suspects that Boyd and Cora would agree if she brought it up.
But they don't talk about the wolves that play games with their minds as they taunt and leer at them from where they cannot be touched. Cora and Erica do not talk about the itch between their shoulder blades that screams out in agony for a body that is no longer theirs.
And time, though slow, does pass.
Cora opens up like a blossoming flower when they fall into their exhausted heap every night, and they share stories of their childhood-similar and separate, shared and apart-and of pack.
Erica treasures the stories about Cora and Derek most, because of what it means to her Alpha, what it will mean when they're found and can share Cora with him like a prize, like a gift for coming to their rescue.
But their rescue is not quick. The pull of the moon is held away until they're less than human and less than wolf.
Conversation fades into hollow looks and wordless glances, until they're too far feral to breathe even a faint smattering of dialogue. Until touch is the only constant left.
Cora, who had learned for the first time the truth of what reckoning had taken away most of her family, reacts wildly one night-she raves and slashes and bites-and does not return to them.
Erica sits wrapped in Boyd's arms with silent tears streaking across the face that belonged to Cora that night.
It is the last night she cries.
It is the last night for many nights, that she knows anything of who she is.
When her head is clear enough for thought, the first thing she remembers is Derek's face before her, four letters tumbling from his lips in the shape of a name that doesn't belong to her but the body she's forced to inhabit, forced to use as her own.
She thinks about telling him that she's not Cora, that the pack of wolves who killed the real Cora cast them into each other's bodies and left them there to rot in the misery of not fitting in the skin they were in.
But she doesn't. She remembers the look on Derek's face when he realised he wasn't alone, that Cora survived these years too, and she cannot take that unexpected joy from him. Derek deserves to have his sister back, damn it, and Erica knows in an instant that she has no other real choice.
Erica is dead and Cora survives.
